Internet Commerce and Software Agents: Cases, Technologies and Opportunities

The Internet is revolutionizing retail merchandising and shopping. This text addresses some major Internet commerce issues and the challenges to be met in achieving automated and secure Internet trading. Among the topics covered are the development of intelligent tools, business models to maximise the benefits of agent technologies, agent-based payments, recommender systems, Web-based smart card agents, Internet lottery systems and wireless virtual communities.

Syed Mahbubur Rahman is currently a professor at the Minnesota State University, Mankato, USA. He worked in several other institutions around the world including NDSU in USA (1999), Monash University in Australia (1993-98), Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET, 1982-92) and Ganz Electric Works in Budapest (1980-82) etc. He was the head of the department of Computer Science and Engineering of BUET from 1986 to 1992. He is co-chairing and is involved as a program/organizing member in a number of international conferences. He obtained his doctoral degree from Budapest Technical University in 1980. He supervised more than 30 research projects leading to masters and Ph.D degrees. His research interests include electronic commerce systems, multimedia computing and communications, image processing and retrieval, computational intelligence, pattern recognition, distributed processing and security. He has published 100+ research papers in his areas of interest.

Robert Bignall holds a BSc(Honours) and Ph.D from the Flinders University of South Australia. He also holds postgraduate qualifications in Further Education and Computer Science. He has served a Senior Lecturer and then an Associate Professor at Monash University since 1990. In 1995 he was appointed as the Foundation Head of the Gippsland School of Computing and Information Technology at Monash University and he served in that role for five years. He was also Acting Director of the Monash Centre for Electronic Commerce in 1998 and 1999. He took up his current position as Pro Vice-Chancellor of Monash University Malaysia at the start of 2000. Professor Bignall's research interests include electronic commerce systems and multimedia technologies. He has also published a number of papers on algebraic and multiple-valued logic and their applications in computer science.